Tuesday I find out that my daughter’s MA coverage was running out at the end of the month. Someone I’ve never spoken to at the Lancaster County Assistance Office apparently can’t be bothered to use their brain when assessing financial information for a self-employed person (i.e. me). When we’re worrying about paying the bills (including groceries), you’d think we would qualify based on financial need. In any case, though, Olivia had also received (and I had noted in recent paperwork to LCAO) an Axis I diagnosis…i.e. a special need…so she qualifies for MA anyway because of her diagnosis in what is colorfully referred to as a loophole category (state or federal gov gets creative).

After dealing with much of the MA mess on Wednesday, I had an IEP that afternoon (also Wednesday) for my son (Jason, 5). Already feeling iffy about the whole thing, I lost my super doper advocate to someone whose need was more pressing. While I have no trouble sharing and truly believe Ms. Buskirk should share her awesomeness with every autism mommy in need (totally the superwoman/godmother of autism)….wherever the need is greatest…the IEP left me feeling kind of iffy about whether what I wanted – a reasonable amount of OT support – was actually going to be achieved. Long story short there was some definite stonewalling going on there by she who shall not be named (person who managed Jason’s case in the very beginning) and despite the best efforts of Jason’s audacious itinerant teacher and speech therapist.

Icing on the cake, though, was Wednesday evening when I heard suddenly that my 3 year old’s services – BSC, MT, TSS – had been denied. Rather than get services to support my kiddo, whose needs, it’s quite apparent, are significant and behavioral in nature, the good ol’ insurance company wants to pass the buck.

Rather than authorize the services Olivia actually needs to hopefully overcome her behavioral issues, CBHNP wants to spend forever and a day investigating her issue, observing her behaviors. Now, I get why the observation is important, believe me. And I love the idea of additional testing and assessment for her…right now, the kid is crazy…not crazy crazy but, to put it mildly, as Emily Bowman can attest, she’s pretty extreme with the emotional meltdowns. The frequency and intensity is exhausting for yours truly…single mom in practice if not in the most technical sense (I’m still married to my obnoxious and perpetually absent other half).

Anyway, we’re now in the grievance process with CBHNP in the hope that they will come to their collective senses about what Olivia needs and what even makes the most financial sense (Early Intervention, people?!) New experience for me and one that I thought I was going to have to go through last time with Jason’s major service increase.

Holding out for a positive result, my hope is that one very ticked off psychologist is going to hit CBHNP for their nonsense campaign. Fingers crossed!

The worst thing about autism, though, is actually the battle of wills you engage in with various organizations established to support special needs children. Every organization from government funded special education support groups to privately operated companies providing behavioral therapy that’s paid for by medical assistance.

The last three weeks have been a total whirlwind for me…and a very dramatic learning experience. I found myself battling my local IU, threatening legal action when they were reluctant to support my son with much needed speech and occupational therapy. Immediately after that, I found myself doing battle with the company providing his ‘wrap’ services, the teacher support person and the behavioral specialist assigned to his case. That situation peaked with a call from the CEO of the company…on a Saturday…with the woman claiming not to know anything about the situation, at that point very tense, and then fishing for information. Yikes.

Winding down from this situation, though, I think the most important lesson I’ve learned – largely thanks to my awesome Lancaster County Autism Mommies advocate – is that you have to know your rights and hold your ground. Special needs parents apparently cannot assume or generally accept that service providers are actually going to support their children, either. Sad, but true. You have to be on top of the situation. You have to add to special needs project manager to your job description.

Kicking some serious ass in the process, though, doing battle with anyone and everyone who holds your child back, the good news is that you really can come out on top. The law is on your side battling autism – your child needs support they are entitled to it, end of story. And thank goodness for that, and for people who advocate for children with special needs (and their parents), because the system feeds on ignorance. Sure, money is an issue. Now, probably more than ever, but families face this struggle day to day. I know I’ve been there, when you just have to buckle down and go to work to come up with the money you need. As a single parent, I find myself doing that a lot. And I manage it. Countless others manage it. The government needs to take a good long look at their spending habits anyway and then go to work to make more money to support these things that really matter – the education and support of special needs families.

Suffice to say the last three weeks – the outcome, I should say, of those weeks – has left me feeling empowered to actually battle autism on its own terms. And I think it is with the government and the school system that you have to be prepared to struggle, albeit as politely as possible, since these are the things we have at our disposal, as parents, to actually combat the diagnosis itself, to parent our children and get them the opportunities they want and need to excel.

Anyone in Lancaster County, checkout Lancaster County Autism Mommies Website because this is a seriously amazing support group for ‘autism mommies’ and just about everyone else impacted by autism. Even if you’re not in Lancaster County, the resources you can access from this site are pretty tremendous.

The system is far from perfect yet but I am trying to have at least an hour every day that I can at least think about the novel that I am working on. Since it’s a novel based on the life of a real person, I can actually productively work on the thing simply by setting aside to read through a couple of biographies, making notes, working out a timeline. After all, it’s stuff that I need to do…at some point. It makes just as much sense, most of the time, that some point is right now or today rather than some indefinite point in time, the ominous ‘someday’ option that some of my planners offer as a deadline.

Adding my novel writing to my work to-do list, though, has proved to be a really useful, and I am also using a timer to record how much time I actually spend writing, etc. I’m also tracking how much time spent each day on another application to keep a record, forcing myself to be honest I suppose.

The conversation this morning, though, was about a gas station owner somewhere out here in PA. From what I gather, a couple has managed to buy a gas station but is now struggling to get the thing up and running.

It’s a situation that raises a couple of issues from this property and money management perspective. First, I think it’s fair to say that most people still look to real estate as the golden ticket to wealth creation. After all, everyone needs a place to live or operate a business. Real estate is one of those assets that, in the long-run, retains its value if you’re even halfway diligent about managing it. Second, though, I think the money management issue definitely comes into play. As the recent economic problems have shown in this country, not everyone is ready to own real estate. Not everyone who has gone out and bought a house was actually financially ready to do so.

Particularly if you are buying a commercial property, such as a gas station, you have to at least have positive cash flow owning the thing. If all you can do is pay the mortgage, if you can’t do any maintenance, if you can’t afford the operating costs (for a business or a home), then owning probably isn’t what you should be doing(!) At least, that’s what I’ve seen and what I’ve found to be confirmed in the research I have done, both on real estate and money management.

Writing for magazines, though, seems so much more fun. It’s also the next best thing, I think, to writing and publishing a novel or non-fiction book. In theory, it takes less time to write a couple of articles and, because the market is relatively large, with some very obscure nooks and niches, it should also be relatively easy to sell your work.

The problem I have, though, is with the generation of ideas. I rarely feel as though I have a story that is worth telling. Even for something I am involved in and relatively successful at, the business of running a freelance writing company, I struggle to find an appropriate angle. And outside of writing, the only other categories of magazines I seem to have any affinity with are parenting or history magazines and pretty obscure academic journals.

What I suffer from, in other words, is a particular type of writer’s block. And let’s face it, if you actually have a system, it is not that difficult to come up with ideas. You just have to be consistent and you have to be persistent too.

One of the ways I’ve discovered of resolving the article idea dilemma is to make use of an RSS feeder on my computer and iPad. First, on my computer, I am subscribed to WritersWeekly, a really fantastic ezine/newsletter that posts every week on new writer’s markets. Paying attention to these listings – lists of magazines and publishers on the look out for new material – is a good way to learn a bit about how the market really works. You can see from most listing exactly what the magazine editors want, an elaboration on their more general guidelines.

Another useful tool, though, is also a system like SkyGrid – a news/feed update system that lets you track different keywords in the news and general media. Google News might be another good alternative.

Basically, I am finding that it’s a lot easier to generate article ideas by having a variety of sources at my disposal for screening news and interesting updates about things. For instance, I read about a dinosaur fossil found along side its footprint. It was a very rare find, apparently, and a rather obscure piece of news. For magazine writing, though, it is the kind of thing that throws off a ton of possibilities.

Musing and (unavoidably) looking out on the rain, though, I’ve been thinking about a couple of novels that feature rain (or other freakish weather) as a kind of plot device. The first think I thought about, thanks to the cuddly toy my 3 year old was clutching, was Winnie the Pooh. In the first book of stories about the famous bear, “the rain rain rain” does indeed come “down down down”. People in Lancaster may already be thinking of this one since, as the Disney song rightly goes on to describe (taking its inspiration from the book) “the river crept out of its bed and crept right into piglets”. Flooding, in other words, is a problem for the animals of the 100 Acre Wood.

A storm with heavy rains is also a feature of Black Beauty (as often depicted in film and cartoon versions of the novel). The horse’s instincts prevent him from crossing a bridge that, with the rising river, is extremely unsteady.

In Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, too, rain and flooding play a very important role. After the tension between Maggie and her brother reaches its climax, perhaps the only way for it to deflate is through an emergency situation. A storm and torrential torrential rain cause tremendous flooding of the river that is fundamental to the functioning of the mill and, likewise, a symbolic component of Maggie and Tom’s childhood together. Worried for her brother, Maggie goes out in a little boat to find Tom and she tries to help him to safety. Their death is very much a result of the storm, as far as the plot is concerned, and even on a symbolic level, the drowning of Maggie and Tom is inevitably linked to the flooding, with the flooding seems to represent the overwhelming force of nature.

For the sake of everyone out here in PA and wherever else the rain is having an impact (I will freely admit I wasn’t paying that much attention to the weather until this morning), I hope the weather clears up sooner rather than later, and certainly that we have nothing quite as dramatic as that which A.A. Milne, Anne Sewell, and George Eliot envisioned for their stories.

I spent about 30 minutes last night plugging in the details of the kids’ schedules on the School & Stuff app. I’ve also got to add some meaningful chores/responsibilities to the Chore Pad app. Other than that, though, we’re ready to go.

I feel that I need to give a shout out to the Fly Cleaning Lady, though, and also make another effort to send overwhelmed parents off in her direction…trust me, I was one of those (still am, really)…but I’m doing much better with all the step by step routines…the most important ones…the morning routine, afternoon routine, evening routine, and bedtime routine. I’ve also got my office routine, made easier thanks to Minutes to Go, but it’s a lot easier to stick to my own routine versus herd the kids to follow their routine.

Here’s hoping 2011/12 is a happy and productive year for all the kids out there and their parents.

As an avoid George Eliot fan, I have to say I was quite taken aback by one comment in particular, and this was apparently a comment that Murdoch had made to Byatt. Asking which writer Byatt thought was the better writer, Murdoch scoffed at Byatt’s suggestion that Middlemarch was the best novel in the English language. Murdoch said, although she thought it was hard to choose which was the best of his novels, Charles Dickens had to be considered the better writer.

Now, I am definitely with Byatt on this one. I think Eliot is by far the superior novelist. I recently attended a lecture in which it was posited that Dickens’ classic novels weren’t even novels, technically speaking, and I think it actually becomes easier to consider his work if this view is accepted. It’s by no means straightforward to define the perimeters of the novel, for one thing, but a general definition that holds for me allows that novels must, to some extent, be an exploration of the psychology of one or more characters, which you don’t really get with Dickens. Take Bleak House, for instance. You never really get a sense of the emotions that run deep in the relationships between Lady Deadlock and Esther, her daughter. You don’t really get much sense of the history of Lady Deadlock. If you haven’t already watched the Masterpiece Theater version of Bleak House, I definitely recommend it. Gillian Anderson is fantastic as Lady Deadlock and the scene with Esther, when she reveals who she is, has never yet failed to make me cry. I wish Dickens’ writing was as powerful. I really don’t believe it is.

That said, what I really wanted to say here was actually about Murdoch and Eliot. Whether or not Murdoch genuinely believed Dickens to be the superior author, Murdoch’s own work was more obviously influenced by Eliot than Dickens. In The Bell, for instance, the central character, Dora, is clearly modeled on Eliot’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke. Dora’s husband, Paul Greenfield, an academic obsessed with his work, is also clearly modeled on Casaubon. Not to mention that Murdoch’s emphasis on morality throughout her works is reminiscent of Eliot’s preoccupations in her own writing rather than anything Dickens did or tried to do in his own work.

Sure there are plenty who would disagree but that’s my 2 cent on the matter.

But what about everything else? Well, 2011 has been a year of change and transition, both professionally and personally. There’s no doubt about that. It was the first year the kids were in school. (I know I’ve now mentioned kids and school twice but it is hard to exaggerate the importance of this one development). It was also the year in which my five year old’s autism (borderline PDD-NS) was officially diagnosed and he started a treatment program – all very positive. Certainly I’ve come away with a better schedule, more time to myself, and a comforting sense that their education is being well managed by the very capable staff at their preschool.

On the business front, it’s interesting to see the shift in the way books and social media are used. I was lucky enough to ghostwrite a book in 2009 that was all about the changes we were likely to see in the next couple of years with wireless connectivity. It’s particularly interesting to see many of the predicted trends occurring – the explosion of ebook readers, the emergence of iPad, the cloud and all that.

It’s also been disturbing to watch the continued economic decline, not only here in the US but back home in England where I have family and friends struggling with unemployment and the rising costs of just about everything. And the recent riots in London were something of an eye-opener, too, and an interesting contrast to all the fanfare surrounding the wedding of William and Kate. As special as the whole thing seemed at 5am with my princess and wedding obsessed 3-year old, the reality is that the rich (and royalty certainly fit in that category) are quite out of touch. Sure, they pay a certain price for the lives they live. These days, being a celebrity seems to be at least a demanding part time job. It’s just a shame that the people with the power and means to influence the world don’t really choose to make changes that recognize the underlying issues that really cause every day people the greatest concern. One of my friends recently struggled to pay their electric bill – a family of five (including a 1 year old child) were about to have their electric shut down – because they have been struggling for over a year to find a full-time job to be able to support their family. As a parent myself, what has me most worried is the health care situation and the education situation for my two kids. Are they going to be able to get the health care they need in the future? Are they going to get an education at school that will help them to achieve their potential and grow into thinking, caring adults? Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, if anyone out there is feeling the need to get a better handle on things with the start of the new school year coming up, here’s a couple of suggestions, especially suitable for working moms…

For your home…checkout Cozi, an absolutely awesome family organizer that lets you track the activities of everyone in your family, create shopping lists, to-do lists, and manage calendars from schools and other organizations you need to keep track of.

Be sure to also take advantage of the Fly Cleaning Lady, who has been paired with Cozi for a while. I have to say that she offers some of the most fantastic checklists and routines out there. As a busy mom with a business to manage on top of everything else, it seems groundbreaking to me that I finally have a schedule for staying on top of the housecleaning and other mundane stuff like laundry (and I would be the first to say I am domestically challenged!)

Mint is also great for budgeting and financial planning – highly recommended and free. Can’t beat that.

For business management, I have to give a shout out to the iPad because I got mine over the summer and just LOVE IT. Words cannot express how great this thing is for everything from reading (I read while I wait for my kids to drift off to sleep) to word-processing when it’s less than convenient to shlep a computer about. And apps like Home & School, the Chores app (forget the exact name), Mint, Expensify, and Project Achiever…they are fantastic for getting things together. Oh, and the ToDo App is great as well – really sleek and effective at managing lots of different tasks.

I am also a fan of ThinkPad and CouresNotes for a lot of the different work I do. And NotePad for handwritten notes…because you never know when you are going to need to scribble something down.

Anyway, here’s to the start of a great school year for everyone…whether you’re a student, a parent, a grandparent, or just someone who would like the opportunity to start afresh.